Archive for January 2007

Senator Andrew Bartlett, who claims to be an “environmentalist”, accidentally lets the cat out of the bag in his latest water post.

According to The Courier-Mail, the Coca-Cola factory at Richlands is one of Brisbane’s top 10 water users. I’m not sure market forces would work with Coke somehow, as you could raise the price of water one hundredfold and they’d probably still make a profit selling it for the same price they are now, although they might have to reduce their advertising budget by 0.1% to cover the extra cost.

But Andrew, I thought the point was to save water, not to reduce the profits of Coca-Cola? There are of course many more water-intensive industries than Coca-Cola (for example: Just about all of them) which WOULD be significantly affected by increasing the price of water, but not all of them are evil, profitable multinationals, so they don’t rate a mention.

A lot of people who really just hate commerce like to hide behind the facade of environmentalism. And Andrew Bartlett is most definitely one of them. Scratch an environmentalist and you find a socialist a majority of the time.

Strangely enough, the draconian smoking bans being imposed across Australia aren’t having the desired effect. Instead of giving up their ungodly habit, smokers are instead staying home and drinking – an approach that has apparently taken the AHA by surprise.

Sly-grogging in sheds, garages and backyards had been reported in about 30 towns across Tasmania, with up to two or three unlicensed premises per town, Australian Hotels Association, Tasmanian manager Daniel Hanna said.

Most reports were from regional or country areas, although some “shed drinking” was occurring in the suburbs, usually in areas with a large proportion of traditional clientele, such as smokers not interested in gaming facilities.

So now, because of restraints of trade placed on them by do-gooders, the AHA is now trying to get “shed-drinking” (otherwise known as sharing an esky with your mates) banned so they can still earn a buck.

After all, this dangerous new practice experts are terming “Having a drink at home with your mates” is incredibly dangerous and irresponsible:

“There is no responsible serving of alcohol, no supervision of minors, these places are not licensed and they are not regulated.

“The situation is setting the scene for irresponsible drinking, drink-driving and the sale of alcohol to minors.”

The AHA is willing to go to utterly ridiculous rhetorical lengths to shut down this worrying situation:

“It’s an illegal activity no different from drug-pushing. We want it nipped in the bud as quickly as possible,” he said.

So, when the cops come knocking on your door this Australia day, just remember when you supported the smoking ban, nanny-state-lovers. And remember how you pooh-poohed the slippery slope argument against it.

A substitute teacher in Norwich, Connecticut with no prior criminal record could get 40 years in prison for exposing a middle school class to pornography. She apparently was using the computer in front of students when a loop of pop-up ads for porn sites began to appear. The loops only intensified as she tried to close out the ads. The woman made the plausible defense that some sort of adware or malware on her computer caused the pop-up ads to appear.

Leaving aside the stunning fact that you can apparently get 40 years for showing vanilla porn to a bunch of teenagers – the woman’s explanation isn’t plausible, it’s obvious. The batshit-insane alternative is that a 40 year old woman with no prior criminal record suddenly decided it would be a fabulous idea to show porn to her class, and then the sites she visited then coincidentally began spawning infinite popups. The case is so prima facie absurd that it should have been laughed out of court. But luckily for the prosecution, they had an “expert witness”:

On a projected image of the list of Web sites visited while Amero was working, Lounsbury pointed out several highlighted links.

“You have to physically click on it to get to those sites,” Smith said. “I think the evidence is overwhelming that she did intend to access those Web sites.”

In other words, this guy was testifying that highlighted links are evidence that that specific link was clicked, rather than simply evidence that the browser has previously visited the destination site. This is beyond jaw-dropping and into criminally incompetent. The witness should be prosecuted for that testimony.